Dear Auntie Pinko,

Let's get directly to my question. How do you deal with wingnuts who say that the constitution does not protect free speech? I hear this argument at times: “The first amendment says, 'Congress shall make no law restricting the freedom of speech...' There! See?! It says Congress shall make no law. There's nothing that says the states or other entities can't restrict your speech.”

I swore an oath to support the constitution when I joined the Marines. And I swore the same oath when I joined the Peace Corps. And so did George Bush and the entire U.S. Congress, for that matter. It's my belief that the constitution is the gold standard for human rights for anyone lucky enough to live in this country. Anything less than what the Bill of Rights provides for is—if you can think of a better phrase, please tell me—un-American. But how do you get extreme conservatives to hear that?

Now on to the pleasantries. I love reading your column, Auntie. You're always reasoned, enlightened and polite to your writers, whether you agree with them or not. Had to say that. About the constitution, I think sometimes about Barbara Jordan, Texas Representative to the U.S. House. She said, “My faith in the Constitution is whole. It is complete. It is total.”

Brian
Madison, WI


Dear Brian,

Well, that’s a new one on me. I’ve never had anyone, even the most fervent conservative, pull that argument out of the hat on the First Amendment. The closest I have heard is the old fire-in-crowded-theater debates and the assertions that ‘wartime’ makes it okay to temporarily place some limits. (We are now, by the way, seeing the dangers of that second argument: When you define ‘war’ as an open-ended state of armed hostility against an undefined, unlimited number of individuals and/or groups without national borders or the legal powers of states, there is no ‘temporary’ about it, is there?) But the notion that the Constitution doesn’t prohibit states from infringing on the rights it explicitly guarantees to all citizens?

Ahem.

Are these the same conservatives who don’t want state and local jurisdictions to have the power to regulate the possession and use of firearms? Are they the same conservatives who want to deny states the right to legalize the medical use of marijuana or assisted suicide?

Or are these the same conservatives who insisted, back in the 1960s, that the Constitution allowed states to deny equal access to voting and public facilities to people on the basis of their skin color and/or ancestry?

I don’t think there are too many people or political ideologies in America that can point to a 100 percent record of consistency in their interpretation of what the Constitution does, and doesn’t, allow. Even the Supreme Court changes its mind. When our particular ideological agenda is at stake one way or the other, we all become dogmatic about what the Constitution does (or doesn’t) allow, and we rarely worry that what we are advocating today is very different from what we argued yesterday. For example, liberals may argue in defense of the Constitutionally-protected right of an animal rights activist group to express antagonism to the fur trade in hateful, violent terms or to impede the access of those delivering test animals to laboratories, etc. on Monday, and on Wednesday claim that the “Reverend” Fred Phelps’ vile hate speech against gay people, disruption of funerals, etc., is not Constitutionally-protected.

The freedom to construct an elaborately-rationalized case for why the Constitution supports our agenda is, fortunately, guaranteed by that same Constitution. But what most of us forget is that the very same Supreme Court ruling that might advance one item on our particular agenda today, might well be the backbone of our opponents’ victory on some item on their agenda tomorrow. Today conservatives might want to grant states the right to infringe on freedom of speech, but what happens on the day when a Democratic President assumes power and arrogates to himself or herself all the same Imperial powers that conservatives have been insisting Mr. Bush should be allowed to exercise? If they protest, can those same ‘infringement of speech’ laws be used against them?

The Constitution is not a long or complex document. It is a little over 7500 words—College instructors assign longer term papers than that. Yet within those words are some of the most powerful guarantees of human rights ever devised. The entire purpose of those who wrote, argued, and voted to accept the document and its amendments was to create a government that would serve its people rather than tyrannize over them. The basis for moderate ideological differences in American political life is that this purpose isn’t being achieved—that we have sacrificed protection from tyranny to empower the government to serve, or that unnecessary protections against a real or imagined tyranny have deprived the government of its power to serve the people.

The root of extreme ideological conflict in America takes this one step further: The assertion that government’s only legitimate purpose is to protect against tyranny, and that virtually any other government service equates to tyranny. Or the notion that a government that cannot guarantee its citizens particular levels of physical or economic sustenance through its own ability to serve is, perforce, subjecting them to a form of tyranny and therefore illegitimate. Shades of meaning and interpretation and the context of current events confuse these ideological conflicts even further. But the words of the Constitution remain. We may amend them, using the Constitutional process itself, we may differ in our interpretation of their meaning, but we may not deny them.

Thank you, Brian, for your extraordinary, multi-dimensional service to our Constitution and your fellow-citizens. You gave a number of years of your best efforts to promote the integrity and ideals that our Constitution represents. I’m proud to have you as a fellow-citizen, and very grateful for your kind words. I hope that my discussion of the subject you raise has provided additional context for you, and thanks for asking Auntie Pinko!